Butt, just caught up on this thread and that sounds like an incredible difficult situation, but it looks like you made the right decision and things will get better from this point out.
In my experience the 100% dependence on someone else is always going to be problematic no matter the country because it creates feelings like you described and also can create resentment. Like for me, a job is always a requirement for an SO not because the money, but because it's important that the other person is somewhat self-sufficient and can take care of the self.
Also about the work culture in Japan issue, when I met with Troidal he told me that after the 24 year old pop idol killed herself from overwork that it finally started the long change of the country admitting that overworking and work culture is a problem and that the nation is slowly beginning to make some changes to move away from the insane work culture. Whether that happens or not, who knows, but he seemed to think the last year or so was beginning to show some progress. Although yesterday I met with a Japanese woman I know who was visiting LA for a conference and she said her friend is overworking herself (and for a Japanese person to say that it must be bad) and even she was studying for some job field's entrance exam and I asked her if she'd seen any good movies and she said she hadn't seen a movie in a year because she doesn't have time with her work & studying and she'll watch movies after the test. She & her friend are in the Kyoto/Osaka area, so it sounds like things are still just as bad as ever in over-working/studying :\
It's an endemic problem. The only way to avoid it is to not be in Japan. The most recent bandage I've seen applied is the "Premium Friday" movement, where Japanese are encouraged to get out and have a life on Friday evening, told to leave "early" (seems more like "on time") and go enjoy their Friday night. Businesses are benefiting from Happy Hour events and it's likely that having some decompression and social time before the weekend is helpful, will lead to less stress, and maybe even more new Japanese babies being made.
I don't get it all, are Japanese people just really slow at work/study because they do everything very methodically? I mean the Swiss work 35 hour weeks and they still do well in a commodity based economy.
Despite their frequent claim that Japanese are superior to non-Japanese people, capable of longer life, greater health, more endurance, what-have-you, they're just human. There are studies which have proved that working in excess of 40 hours is increasingly inefficient. This is just as true here, despite the myth of Japanese superhumanity.
In many companies, the problem isn't that there's too much work, but that the perception of working one's share –including overtime– is more important than the actual amount of work accomplished. At my Nissan, my younger BIL worked from before 8AM until 11PM every day, though the last 3~4 hours of every day were just a butts-in-seats scenario in the office. Workers culturally cannot go home before their manager, and the manager wants to be seen to inspiring hard work. It's a kind of arms race, with the hours gradually increasing into ridiculous numbers. When Carlos Ghosn took over and re-vamped the company, he forced everyone to go home by 9PM by cutting off the power. It was said that ONLY a foreigner would be capable of making that kind of change.
